I’m getting ready for a trip home. Or I’m not getting ready. I’ve been really bad at doing all the things I wanted to finish before I left for a week. Instead, I spent a lot of time on the couch taking medication and sleeping. The current weather pattern has been killing my head and sinuses.

What I have done is bought a new camera, I love it and I will post the first photo’s on it here, just as soon as I get to Idaho. I bought a new dress for my niece’s wedding that didn’t fit and fell off me. I think their sizing chart is off or I did a really bad job measuring my chest.

One wrench in my plans was that I realized I needed to renew my Driver’s License BEFORE I left on my trip. My birthday will happen when I’m in Idaho. So I had to use the money I set aside to check my luggage to renew my license. So now I have to figure out how to everything into a small carry on suitcase. I think I’ll take three outfits, wear one outfit, and do laundry at my mom’s half way through the trip.

I didn’t lose the weight I wanted to lose. I lost that 13 pounds at the beginning of the year and never managed to lose any more. I just stalled out. The good thing is my mom has a really nice treadmill. I miss my treadmill. It died on me a few years back.

I hope to get out and about and take LOTS of photos. I want to give a good overview of anything I can. I’m sure my focus or goals. Home no longer feels like home. The town of 5000 that I grew up in exploded after I moved and now is over 28,000. That is a huge jump. It happened over about 15 years I think. I graduated in 1988. I can’t go back that far, but in 1990, the population was 7,700. The 28,000 is from 2012. At one point, they said it was the fastest growing town in the state. The population quadrupled in 22 years. No wonder it doesn’t feel like home anymore. The populations when from 5011 when I lived near the population sign in grade school to 7,700 two years after graduation. Very slow growth the entire time I lived there, then an explosion of people coming. It is strange to me.

Downtown Post Falls along the Spokane River.

My flight is an early morning one. And I have a lot to do. Before work I managed to get a load of laundry started, emptied the dishwasher, cooked a back sandwich for breakfast and a steak for lunch, moved the laundry to the drier and started a second load, and that is about it.

Now I have to pack, and clean, and find the charger for my personal dvd player. And try to find my mp3 player that has been missing for a year. It has to be in one of the still unpacked boxes in my room. I want to clean and unpack some of those boxes. I feel like I have a lot on my plate that I left to the last minute. Because I really did. It is all my fault. But trying to sleep just seemed like a good idea at the time.

So tonight, like most pre-flight nights, I’m going to be up late cleaning and up early to make a predawn drive to the airport.

About a year ago, our work load doubled. We were ending the day with 40 things still needed to be done on a regular basis. Business was really picking up and they started to try to hire more people to keep up. It wasn’t just my unit that was busy and behind. Everyone one was overloaded.

The last time I was relaxed, about a year and a half ago. And I was sick at the time. But relaxed.

Then around last November or so, the work load went up again, nearly tripled from what it had been originally. We were now ending the day with around 60 tasks waiting.

My baseline is when we had 10 to 20 tasks left over. Which at the time was thought to be too high. But the person who put the things into our workflow would dump a huge batch in about an hour before closing, which is only 30 minutes before the first batch of people leave for the day. There was no way to get those items finished before closing.

The hiring to get enough staff for the new workloads hadn’t been done in a hurry so now we were REALLY feeling it.

Today at 8:30 am was the first day in over a year where my primary tasks were caught up. The bucket I work from was down to 0.

Zero.

Nothing.

Empty.

WOW.

That hasn’t happened in over a year. Over 12 month, probably about 14 months really.

I haven’t had to hunt for something to do in that long. I don’t really know what to do with myself. In order to try to find a different way to balance the clerical work loads, job duties were shifted and shuffled and moved around. In some cased, procedures have changed for work buckets from which I no longer pull. So I can’t just jump in and help with those. I am sort of at a loss this morning.

I need to find a topic to write about. Or work on photos but my camera died. Well, it’s ability to operate from a battery died. And I can’t afford to replace it until May 9th at the soonest. The camera, not the battery. I did that already. The journey to find a battery made me realize it was probably time to just replace the camera. Maybe I should clean out my desk drawers and re-organize. I’m not sure. If I didn’t have to stay on the phone lines, I would walk around the office to stretch my legs.

What I really want to do is a happy dance around the office. That that would look a little silly.

43 Days until I want to move all my furniture. Is it to early to start writing about moving?

I’ve spent the past two weeks teasing myself with the floor plan. I’m so eager to be moved already.

I want to move on the third weekend in May. I have 6 weekends before then. Trying to organize packing this far out is a terrible challenge. It is hard to focus on specific areas.

My roommate is moving in next weekend. I am taking the day off because I’ve been informed that I get the job of directing the placement of his furniture in all the public rooms and he doesn’t care where the kitchen stuff goes just so long as he can find it.

I think I may finally have a plan for my stuff. Start with books and clothes. Pack the boxes I have and try to set aside a box each for donations. (I’ve gone through one of 10 book cases and only come up with 6 books to donate!)

The goal is to get rid of the two smaller brown bookcases that really are not in very good shape. So I really ought to try to weed out that many books. I will pack away winter clothes and costuming stuff. Of the three boxes of too small clothes I couldn’t part with 3 years ago, I’ll sort through and ONLY keep a few items as motivators. I’m moving with a friend who has an elliptical and the apartment has a really nice fitness center.

Of the clothes currently in the dressers and closet, I ought to try to weed out a good portion. Since I’m moving, it’s really a good time to break down and get rid of some of the beloved pieces that got an oil stain that would never come out, or mystery washing machine stains that were not there before loading into the washer. Since I’ll be saving every month, I should just start refreshing my wardrobe by one item a month. So I should purge it ahead of time.

Next will be my scrapbooking stuff and hobby stuff. (non-stitching) Not a lot of weeding to do in that stuff. But it is also stuff that I can easily not use before the move.

Weekend three should belong to organizing, sorting, and packing most of my computer and electronic stuff and returning the Cox Digital box to them. I will probably not going to have cable again. It is just too expensive anymore. And SyFy shows my programs on SyFy Rewind. So I can watch them eventually. I mostly use Hulu and Netflix at 1/8th the cost of my cable bill.

Weekend four is getting closer to move date so I can really start packing up the majority of kitchen and bathroom stuff. At this point I’ll start taking my boxes over as well. I can get my bathroom set up and half my clothes in my bedroom closets and start getting stuff organized. Maybe I’ll get a new computer desk and set it up over there ahead of time and when I move my computer at the end, I’ll put the sewing/computer desk in the storage closet. It collapses flat. I also want to get rid of the extra dresser I use for storage and the computer des I’m currently using. Move it to the previously mentioned sewing desk during this packing stage.

Weekend 5 will see to the packing and organizing of my very important stitching stuff and anything else I want to see handled with great care. And moving more boxes. I still need to find someone who can remove my defunct treadmill.

This brings me to Weekend 6. The last weekend before the big move. I’ll leave myself with basic bathroom and kitchen stuff. One week of clothing. Get everything moved over except the BIG stuff. And take over empty drawers from the dressers so it is easier to move them.

That leave 4 piece bedroom set. One small table with 4 chairs. 8 bookcases some only 3 feet some up to 6 feet. One entertainment center. One flat screen t.v. and one regular t.v. One sewing/computer table. One hope chest. One rocking chair. And my computer.

My biggest concern is finding people to help me move. Movers will cost a minimum of 200 dollars for a minimum of two hours. Not sure I can afford that, but I could try. If it went over 2 hours then it would be a real problem. Maybe I can move all the short book cases myself. (I’m doing the computer myself.) The end table I could possibly do. Not sure the collapsible sewing/computer table will fit in my car. But I could try it. I could probably get the 4 chairs in my car at one time. And the bedroom TV.

Renting a U-haul is so much more affordable, but if I can’t find muscle to help me move (for the price of beer and pizza) it doesn’t’ do me much good.

I have to make that decision in the next two weeks so I can get it set up. That is the only thing I don’t have much time left on to make that choice.

The last two weekends in May will be for moving anything I didn’t get moved already and getting a professional carpet cleaner in and for doing the rest of the cleaning on my own. I do own my own carpet cleaner. But it doesn’t do the greatest job. Not when trying to clean up an entire carpeted area.

On the whole, I wish I could start taking over stuff this instant. I’m to eager to be in the new setting, in a lovely apartment, with a nice gym, no longer having to park on the street, no longer having to run the dishwasher to get the water hot enough for a hot bath, and saving some money each month.

The Crunchy Urbanite wrote a blog about planning Wonder Woman’s funeral that was a good blog. The ultimate point was that we should make sure to make our last requests for our remains and funerals ones that our loved ones can actually reasonably follow.

It was a good blog but I couldn’t help but focus on Wonder Woman. Some of you may have come across some of the articles a few months back (or more) that Wonder Woman is getting a makeover and a rewrite. I won’t say reboot because to me that means a restart of a movie franchise.

She now gets to wear pants and a jacket. She is looking very urban and very much part of the nocturnal crowd or the underworld. Edgy and darker. With her new outfit, even if a friend of mine says it is too generic, you could put her down in any vampire story and she would look like she fits in.

If I was taller and thinner, or just thinner, I would totally wear her new outfit. But that is part of the problem with it. It no longer looks like a superhero’s uniform. It looks like something anyone (with the figure) could wear most places.

My biggest gripe is the change in her back story. The writers have apparently decided that people like angst ridden anti-heroes best and they are taking her in that direction.

The island she came from has been invaded and everyone killed. She is the only survivor. She goes out into the world to fight the evil that destroyed her world. I’m paraphrasing from my memory of the articles.

Admittedly, the big comic book houses have changed back stories before. But this one just irks me. I feel like they couldn’t come up with anything so they stole Superman’s back story and gave it to Wonder Woman.

I feel like the Wonder Woman I grew up with has died. Admittedly, I haven’t read comics in a long time and haven’t kept up with the story line. But now I know how my mom felt when they killed off Superman. 40, 50, 60 year olds who hadn’t read comics since they were teenagers and they all went and bought copies of it to keep in sleeves. That was when I discovered my mom read comic books. She never seemed the type.

Still, I feel like we really should be holding a funeral for the old gal (Wonder Woman, not my mother). May she rest in peace.